Here I try to put ideas together in ways that perhaps are not immediately apparent. After all everything and every cause and effect is ultimately related to every other. Finding these hyper-dimensional ties between things and pointing them out is my pleasure, and indulgence here.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

One gm can be converted into .025 Terra watt hours, or 25,000 Mega watt hours, or 33.5 million horse power hours, or 2.23 million gallons of gas ... or one Nagasaki, depending on which measurement you think you understand.

One of my favorite programs is the Unix 'units' program. This program can convert from cm to miles for example. The really cool thing about it is that all of the definitions are in a special 'language' and stored in a file called units.dat.

Many years ago I taught units a very cool trick by substituting the value for the speed of light with 1 and changing the length of a second to meters. This creates the awesome ability to quickly change mass to energy and vice-versa.

Currently I use the version of units that comes with CGWIN.

To create a light_units.dat file apply the following changes to a new /usr/share/light_units.dat file.